This, for better or worse, is VIII Nothing—dark corner of the cosmos and home to the creative conjurations of Ryan Starsailor, John Blacksher and a handful of other lowly hacks who 1) don’t know how to not be insane, and 2) have realized that the world really doesn’t have that much to offer.

We’re doomsday poets and disillusioned romantics. We’re conspirators and saboteurs. We’re also foolish enough to think that we can save culture, one black-and-white essay at a time, all from this submerged fortress of independent thought.

The idea to do whatever it is we do was conceived in a dark pool of water one summer night. Two comrades lamented just how damn stupid everything is, and how the world is being desecrated by ferocious, violent garbage-tankers waving the banner of “Art” at half mast. It had to be stopped.

Since then, we’ve been drinking too much and shredding the guitar and screaming at the moon and feeling pretty rotten about the girls who used to love us. It makes for great writing.

Yes, and it is writing that we have to offer you. Free artistic expression! We pound on these keys, God love it, and sometimes wonderful things happen. We believe in the absurdities thrust upon us, and those we thrust upon ourselves. We swerve off the beaten path in search of inspiration and adventure and inanity so that we might better serve the world as scribes and wordsmiths and insane losers. Spectators are welcome, but unnecessary. We write for our sanity.

Welcome to this stone hovel on the edge of the world, the last monastic library of imaginative writing preserved throughout, and built as homage to the creeping apocalypse. We’re going down in flames and we know it.

Love,

R. S. & J. B.

Author bios:

There are two chief writers here: Ryan Starsailor and John Blacksher. If you click on our names, you’ll be quickly inundated with information you couldn’t possibly want to know. Have fun with that.

Submitting work:

If you’d like to see your work on VIII Nothing, please look over our submission guidelines. If it’s worth a damn, we’ll post it. Then you can tell all of your friends that you were published on a website that no one has ever heard of.

If you want Ryan to edit your homework (or whatever):

Please send your essays/school assignments/cover letters/anything to ryan.starsailor@gmail.com. Ryan will be happy to clean up the spelling/grammar/syntax and offer suggestions as to how to make your paper (probably) sound better. He has a degree in English literature and would like to feel relevant in a world that has deemed him irrelevant.

Say hello:

We would love to hear from you (be nice): viii.nothing@gmail.com.